 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Samuel and I'm here with my colleagues Masayuki and Dongma and we are here to share some of our experience as non-native English speakers in open source communities. So just to get started, let's give you a brief introduction of ourselves and share a little bit of our backgrounds. Hi, I'm Masayuki Igawa. I'm working for now SUSA and I'm now concentrated to contribute to OpenStack things, especially OpenStack QA things. I'm one of the quarrel viewer. One of the projects is Tempest quarrel viewer and I'm working at the Japan Tokyo office. So this is the first time to visit First Asia. I'm really happy and I'm really happy, glad to provide this presentation to you. Yeah, thank you. Hello everyone. I'm Dongma. I'm Chinese, currently living in Beijing China. I work for Holy Packer Enterprise as a software engineer, mainly focused on the open source stuff. Currently, mainly work on the OpenStack upstream contribution. I usually work for the Forth Solid project as a contributor. I'm the sectar, joined the Forth Asia. Yeah, thank you. So my name is Samuel de Medeirosquerois. I'm Brazilian. I'm working remotely for SUSA from Brazil from a city called Natal and I'm also involved in the OpenStack community. I am a Keystone car reviewer and it's also my first time here. So thanks for having us. So what does this talk about? As I said, we are here to share some of our experience as non-native English speakers in open source communities, more specifically in the OpenStack community where we have been contributing for several years. And we are going to at least to enumerate some challenges we have been facing in the community and then how we have done to overcome those challenges. And lastly, we are going to share with you some tips we have, we find useful when onboarding newcomers in your respective communities. So we are, so Chinese and the Brazilian and the Japanese. So we will share our experience and feeling and the thinking as a non-native English speakers and we will share challenges based on the cultural side and it's based on our two stories. So from my side, I am Japanese and the first one is not to say yes and no clearly. So many of the Japanese tend to avoid to say yes or no clearly. So which means we tend to express our opinion unclearly. So we, it is, I think we think it makes us respect each other. So for example, another example is that we say in Japanese, in Japanese, so which means I'll do my best in the dictionary, but the actual meaning is I'll do nothing. So in many cases, not every time, but in many cases. So this is used in formal conversations. So it's very bad things, I think. But in Japanese culture, it is not so program, because we know that. But in international communications, it is really bad. It is really bad. So we should really avoid to use like that things. So the second is tend to be perfect. So Japanese are really trying to tend to be perfect. And that is good, but we will fear or scare about the mistakes things, especially speaking or listening. If it is not perfect, we tend to avoid to speak or listening. So it is really bad to conversation things. And the third one is keep intonation. Yeah, so we Japanese tend to keep intonation in conversations, speak flat. And it's very different behavior in normal English conversations. So I think it seems to like Japanese people don't have emotion, but it is not. So we have the emotion and the passion. So I will, I really try to show up my emotions. Yeah. And size of economy. So size of economy is actually Japan's size of economy is big. So we don't need to try to have a conversation to international people, foreign people. It is really bad for our situation. I think we should, we should take a conversation to other people's international conversations. It's really important for us. And focusing on reading and writing, the most of the school, school class is focusing on reading and writing. So that is, that is important, but it is not, it is not perfect for English conversation. We need to speak and the listening to our conversation. So we need to try to hard exercise for that things. And pronunciation and the grammar is really different from English and between English and Japanese. So for example, French thing L and R is really difficult for me. So we don't, we cannot distinguish the two words. For example, the light, and the right, right hand is different, but I'm not sure you can understand like this pronunciation. Yeah. This is really difficult. Yeah, there are some other like these things in other language, I think. And the other thing is grammar. Grammar is completely different in English and the Japanese. For example, subject verb, object is the basic order in English. But in Japanese, subject object verb is the basic order. So it's really complicated for me, confused me. Yeah. So I need to switch my brain to English brain and Japanese brain. It's very confusing. And the last one for me is katakana thing. We have the three type of characters in Japanese that is kanji and hiragana and katakana. So katakana is used for important words like network or file or comment like this. But this is, we can understand the katakana is network, this is similar pronunciation, but different actually. So we say network in Japanese or file is file or comment like this. So it's very confusing for me in English. And the third one is Japanese made in English. So we have some Japanese made in English like a Pasokon and Aekon and Otobai. That means a personal computer and air conditioner. And Otobai is a motorbike. It's very difficult, different. And Pasokon, it's very confusing. And Pasokon is not English, but most of the Japanese believe that this is English. So it's very confusing things. Yeah. Okay. I will share some important experience from the China culture. And the Chinese culture also have some similar things like the Japanese culture. I just will quickly introduce one traditional culture called the Confucian culture created by this man, confused. This culture is great influence the Chinese character. This culture based on the tradition culture of the Xia, Shang, Zhou dynasty. It's about 2000 years history. And the whole Confucian text is summarized by four books and five classes. One of the book called the Doctrine of the Ming and the Chinese name is Zhong Yong. One guideline of this book is Lannisy. So this traditional culture will lead some behaviors for Chinese people. For example, Chinese people sometimes like to see, yes, but don't like to see, no. When they don't want to do something, we don't say no directly. We should see something others. That will be some misunderstanding. Also, we would like to lessen them but don't like to negotiate. Sometimes we don't like to fight. We also have some Chinese issues. The Chinese pronunciation is not understood by others. The local Chinese, we have some pronunciation come from the Chinese pinyin. I think it's some different with the English. So it's hard to understood by others sometime. Also, we didn't follow very well with the English grammar. For example, if we meet some friends, we will say hi, hello in English. But in Chinese, sometimes we will say, do you eat? Which I mean, do you eat? And we also have some writing issues. I think it's similar with the other non-native English speaker. We can talk about it later. Okay. So now from a Brazilian perspective, I have found that there is no like a huge difference between cultures in terms of speaking out. So like Japanese or Chinese, they may hesitate to speak. We don't have that. However, there are some differences that I would like to list here. And one that is very interesting is that sometimes American or British people may be very direct or short in response. And that may sound a little bit rude for us, even if that's not the intent. There are also some grammar particularities. For example, the vowel I in Portuguese is pronounced exactly the same way as the vowel E in English. So we just say E in Portuguese. And sometimes that may cause you to make mistakes when typing words. For example, listening to a music or something, trying to take notes. There is also the adjective position. So in English, the adjective comes first. And then the noun, it's exactly the opposite in Portuguese. So we don't say like the beautiful house. We say the house beautiful. And that may also be confusing at the beginning. We also have that some phonemes don't exist in Portuguese. For example, the TH sound. And that's confusing. And you may find some Brazilian people replacing the TH sound sometimes by the F sound. For example, they may say thing instead of thing. And I also found that in Brazil, despite the fact you start learning English very early, you do not get to a very good level because they regularize schools do a very poor job teaching English to kids. Okay, so now we have talked about the cultural aspects, the cultural challenges related to being a non-native English speaker. And then we are going to show you now a few points related to the language skills itself. We are going to have split the content in the four skill sets of the languages. So we are going to address the reading, writing, listening, and then speaking. And we are going to start now with reading. So the reading part, reading is the, yeah, luckily the reading is the easiest part in most of the case. And but it's very important because the most of the technology information is written in English. And asynchronous conversation like email is in English in most of the open source community. But luckily we have the opportunity to read it again if we don't understand the emails or something like that, things. And so we can use a lot of tools for that. For example, dictionary or Google translation or something like that. It is very useful to understand the article or emails or something. But so IRC conversation goes fast, yeah. So like a chat, IRC or Slack or something, it's very open and very massive. So I actually cannot follow it sometimes. And I need to use Google translation or dictionary to understand that. And sometimes long emails conclusion is unclear. So there are sometimes very long emails. And I read finally what's the conclusion or something like this. So I need to spend a lot of time to read and understand that. And so I think we should, the email should be more simple and easy to read. We don't need to put between lines for the minutes. Okay. I will share some challenges for us with writing. First one is the English grammar is an issue. As we said before, the structure of the sentence is very different from different languages. Another challenge is writing long and beautiful sentence is very difficult for the non-native English speaker. So the simpler sentences are prevalent. I think simpler sentences avoid misunderstanding. But sometimes it's difficult to see the detail things. So we should care about it. Also sometimes the speed is also needed in the text chat. Like RSE, hand out slack. Sometimes the speed is challenging for us. For example, if we chat on the RSE, the discussion is very fast. When I try to tap one sentence and two pages out. So, yeah. Okay. Next. Talking about listening. So we have addressed reading and writing. Listening is a little bit more challenging because when it comes to face-to-face conversation, you got to give responses and understand that in real time. It's not like reading. As Masayuki said, you can read as many times as you need. And in face-to-face conversation, it's not very good if you ask the person to repeat that several times in the same conversation. So we have noted that it's harder than reading and writing. And there are some aspects of this skill that makes it a little bit tricky. And the first one is the variety of accents. For example, in the OpenStack community where we work and in most of the communities, open-source communities, where you have globally distributed teams, you get a large variety of accents. So when going to OpenStack events, for example, the OpenStack Summit, we get to talk to people from North America, from Australia, from Asia, Brazil, and so on. And there are hundreds, maybe, of accents involved there. There is also the speed of conversation that's natural because when two people who talk the same mother language get together, they use to talk quicker than when you have a mix of people from different languages. And that also makes it harder for us to understand. There is also the vocabulary, of course, because if people are using words that you cannot get during the real-time conversation, that may lead you to just misunderstood the conversation and be afraid of participating. There is also the grammar, of course. For example, Masayuki, the way the sentences are organized are completely different. And maybe he doesn't know that, but his brain needs to translate that to put the words in the right ways so that he can effectively understand what's being said. And lastly, to make it even more challenging, communication, face-to-face communication happens in noisy environments. So despite having all those challenging points, we also have the noise going on. So it's even harder to understand. Our last point is, our last skill set is speaking, and we've got Masayuki. So the speaking part is more difficult, I think, than listening. So basically output to something is more difficult than input to something. Especially speaking requires real-time vocabulary and grammar skills, too. So as I said before, the English words and the English words and the pronunciation are very different from our mother languages. So the speed and the frequency, if speed is low and the frequency is very low, the conversation is really boring sometimes. And if the speed and the frequency are low, maybe native speakers are really boring sometimes. So it causes a very bad conversation. So we need to practice and exercise the speed and the frequency and the speaking skills. So the next part is the overcoming obstacles. We have a lot of challenges, as we said. But we are now overcoming some of these things, not all. And we would like to share the things and the tips for them. It would be good for the conversation, for rent conversations. So Vincent? I will share some tips for us to overcoming the obstacles. First one, the cultural challenges are harder than the language challenges. The cultural differences need to be respected and the English skills can be improved. And second is the language immersion. I think you should be in contact with the English language as much as you can. Try to forget your limitations. Then do your best and you will immediately improve. Also, you need to read as much as you can to gather more vocabulary and to improve your English skills. Here we have a few more tips. And we have found that communicating daily is very important to brushing up your skills. So always try to communicate, maybe via messaging or trying to communicate to our colleagues in your office daily, just to make sure you are making progress. There are also a lot of tools that can be useful out there. Masayuki mentioned that you may use Google translator, you may use online dictionaries as well. And they help a lot, especially when you have the time to do that, when reading and writing emails. Try to practice with yourself and with others. So one thing that is very interesting, at least for me, is that practicing through yourself works. I was caught sometimes when I was first learning English and French. I was talking to myself and people around me might be thinking I was crazy, but that's very useful because one thing is when you may make the subject and the ideas inside your head and other things when you try to put the words out. And the last point is trying to set up one-to-one conversations with a friend or someone who does speak the language you are trying to learn. Because if you talk to a single person, it's very easy to get comfortable and if you are afraid to make mistakes in a large audience, that's much easier when talking to a single person. And lastly, we are going to share with you a few tips that may be useful when onboarding newcomers in your respective communities. Sayuki. So this is newcomers for newcomers, but I think this is useful for all newcomers. That means not only for non-native speakers newcomers but also native speakers newcomers. I mean that. But especially important to non-native speakers. So first one is be friendly. So be open your mind and most of the people, especially open-source communities, people are very open-minded. So you can find friends or mentors if you are friendly. But if you are not friendly, you cannot get friends or something. So if the friends or mentors are really good at English, it's really lucky for your English skill. So you can exercise your English skill through a communicate with the friends. It's really good. And the final mentor. Mentors can give you about technical things and also maybe communication things. It's also important. And share your opinion. If you don't share your opinion, people don't understand your opinion. So this is very important. And sharing your opinion through using a conversation skill, English conversation skill, it would be a good training for English communication. And prepare in advance. So preparation is preferable. It's needed. And so this is like these sessions. We are actually exercise for these sessions. I'm not sure this is good or not. So I hope this is good for you. And so the ask questions. So you should ask questions in English that is really good to exercise. One of them is really good to exercise for English. So this is, I don't think you don't need to think about really special, fantastic questions. It should be a simple question. It's really good for that. For example, number two slide is not, it's unclear for me. So please explain that again. This is really good question, I think. So it should be simple. Simple is good. And the brush up your English skill. This is also needed for us, especially for me. So, yeah, we don't have enough English skills right now, but we can brush up for that. It leads really good conversation, really good communication with other people in open source communities. Okay. We will share some tips for the native English speaker. First one should be patient. So each of the non-native English speaker levels is very different. Sometimes you'll feel frustration or conversation with them due to the pronunciation or grammar or vocabulary. So please be patient for them. Also, please speak slowly, especially in group discussions. The very heat up, speed up discussions will let the non-native English speaker hard to understand. So the next is to try to use a simple word and a simple sentence as you can to avoid the misunderstanding. Next one to encourage the communication to make them comfortable enough to talk up. And the last one and the important one is, please don't make fun of them. Yeah. That's all our sessions. Thank you. Does anybody have questions? So thank you for the very good speakers. So I don't understand your situation because I'm Japanese. So I want to know what is the most important thing to communication with each other? And the question is what is the most pay attention to when you communicate with each other? So there were two questions. The first one, what are the most important things when communicating? And the question two, what are the things you need to pay attention to the most? So yeah, good question. So first question is most important things, right? So yeah, in my opinion, I think, yeah, it's difficult. I think this is, every time I think the others, what's thinking? I respect others. That is really important. The last one is don't make fun things. Yeah, that is really important. If they make fun something and some others, it's really bad relation. So respect each other is really good, really important for me, I think. So cool. I agree with him. So basically, I think the native speakers need to be patient, to respect, do not make fun because we are trying to make an effort because we could basically just be working on projects that are like communicating in our native languages and we wouldn't be having like any issue, like we are having here. So we need to be respected and we need to feel comfortable to be speaking like to an audience, to be speaking to other folks. So we need to feel confident and to feel comfortable. And if you feel that like you are being respected, you won't feel comfortable, of course. And the next question was about the things you need to pay attention. So it really depends on what you are talking about, but you need to, as in any conversation, you just need to know what you are talking about. So ask good questions, share your opinion, as you've said. So things like that. Nothing really specific. Not sure if you had anything as in mind. Do you have more questions? Okay, so we ran out of time. Thank you very much for having us.